Chandler (1971) We've now viewed more than few of these misbegotten MGM whats-its that crawled out the wreckage of MGM while it was briefly under the destructive thumb of James T. Aubrey, the 'smiling cobra' reptilian executive.
Surprisingly, we can't lay the blame on Aubrey's meddling for this movie......a decidedly odd stab at making a broad daylight, contemporary film noir.
\ Because we don't think the Cobra's tampering with this movie did anything to harm it. The damn thing was stillborn to begin with.
Two years after 'Chandler's release, Robert Altman made "The Long Goodbye", exactly the kind of movie the 'Chandler' filmmakers failed to bring off......a clever collision of 1940's Private Eye cynical toughness with the casually hip lifestyles of modern day California.
The 'Chandler' team seemed to be going for the remote, style-conscious airs of a French New Wave film....(a la "Breathless"). We think.......but who knows?
In that regard, the screenplay's plot remains deliberately obtuse, vague and unknowable. The filmmakers didn't much care what it's about, one way or the other. (There are villainous characters, but who they are, what they want and why they want it are barely explained.....)
So here we have weary P.I. Chander ( Warren Oates), who's just quit a numbing, mindless job as a security guard, hired to shadow a mysterious French woman (Leslie Caron, 40 at the time and still stunning).
For reasons known only to the filmmakers and not to the audience, two sinister powerful executives (Gordon Pinset, Mitchell Ryan) and a garrulous government agent of some sort (Newsman turned actor Alex Dreier) want to constantly rough up and kidnap Caron.
Hence our gumshoe Chandler becomes, naturally, the enigmatic woman's protector and savior.......we guess.
A movie like this, in order to justify its generic opaqueness, would need creative, dazzling visuals to make it worth your while......
"Chandler" lacks any such required stylings. It's shot flatly with no imagination, like a TV episode where all the exposition pages were ripped out of the script. Oates, normally the most resourceful of scene-stealing actors, gets nothing to work with here.......and Leslie Caron looks blank and baffled about ending up in this movie after her stellar career in MGM musicals.
Of all the aborted, sliced and diced, and ruined movies that came out of James Aubrey's hellish reign, we doubt if even an uncut, untampered version of "Chandler" would have been any better than what's left on view here.
A nothing of a movie, going nowhere fast. We were tempted to hand out a Zero, but we'll upgrade it to 1 star (*) for all the veteran, welcome familiar faces that pop up in the supporting cast....Gloria Grahame, Richard Loo, Walter Burke, and the always growly Charles McGraw.
Nice seeing those folks. They all deserved a better movie.
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